Editors at Portland’s Oregonian are in the process of finalizing a set of guidelines for Twitter, which will include a specific section on retweeting. The new rules will urge reporters to assume any retweet is seen as an endorsement, not just passing something along, Editor Peter Bhatia says.

“Journalists in the mainstream have long understood that our chosen field requires special care in how we interact publically,” Bhatia says. “I don’t see this as any different than the limits most journalistic organizations ask of its journalists in the way they engage in partisan politics or political speech.”

I like the Oregonian and respect its long record of outstanding journalism. Peter Bhatia is a friend. When I worked at the American Press Institute, he was on the board, and we chatted frequently at board meetings. The Oregonian hosted the pilot seminar in 2005 of a series of ethics seminars I later presented in a dozen newsrooms around the country. We have chatted at other conferences and have conferred about career opportunities. I value his friendship and don’t criticize him lightly. But he’s mistaken about this.

I don’t think Peter has enough experience with Twitter to make good decisions about how his staff should use it. He does tweet, which is more than most news executives dictating social media policies. But he doesn’t use Twitter much.

Peter’s Twitter account is private, meaning you can see his tweets only if he allows you to follow him (I do). He has allowed 428 people to follow him (and a quick perusal showed many of them are people in the community). But a private account still limits your engagement with the community.

Peter isn’t easy to find if you click Twitter’s “who to follow” link. You can’t find him by typing his first and last names with a space between him, or by searching for “Oregonian editor.” He has no bio in his profile and lists his name the same as his username, “peterbhatia,” with no space. It’s a distinctive name, and he has a recognizable photo in his profile. But most engaged tweeps open their profiles and make themselves easier to find.

He has tweeted only 203 times. My survey of his recent tweets showed most of them to be retweets of Oregonian staff members’ tweets. He doesn’t engage much with the community on Twitter. I think if he engaged more, he would understand Twitter and retweeting better and see the folly in trying to inhibit his staff’s use of Twitter.

As Jeff Jarvis said on Twitter, retweets are quotes, not endorsements.

Oregonian staff members quote statements they don’t endorse all the time. They should also be free to retweet without inhibition. I’m not saying that a staff member’s retweet of a highly partisan or inflammatory tweet might not merit a discussion of whether the person should have added some comment, either in the retweet or in a subsequent tweet, to add some context and make clear that the staff member wasn’t endorsing the views.

But I think that newsrooms can guide staff members’ social media use more effectively with collegial conversations than with restrictive policies. I encourage you to reconsider the retweet issue before you finish that policy, Peter. If you want a good model for staff rules on social media, I suggest John Paton’s.

Update: Thanks to Peter for a quick response to my invitation to explain further:

It is a set of guidelines under construction … it calls for caution in making sure we aren’t seen as endorsing a particular point of view. There are limits on journalists; that’s as it always has been and should be. Our credibility is our most important possession. That can cause conflict from time to time with the wide-open world of social media. So we manage it as best we can.

Update: I forgot to add that I have DM’d and emailed Peter, inviting him to respond. Also, I should add that I probably would not have written about this, except that I have blogged so often about newsroom social media policies.

Update: I added a couple tweets to the responses here, and may add a few more.

Update: I don’t agree with these tweets by David A. Johnson of the Odessa American. And I don’t have time to respond to them right now, but I want to add them:

To be clear: I favor using good judgment in retweeting. Yes, if you know something is inaccurate, you point that out when you link to it. If you question its accuracy, you ask whether your tweeps can help you confirm or refute (as Carvin frequently does). If you think something is outrageous or offensive, note that when you retweet (or in a subsequent retweet if that would require shortening the original tweet too severely).

But sometimes I just retweet someone who disagrees with me because that person is criticizing me, and I give my tweeps credit for enough sense to figure out that I’m just acknowledging the criticism and sharing it with my tweeps. I retweet Gene Weingarten frequently, often about points of disagreement (argued about two-point conversions in football the past few days).

Will some people misinterpret my retweets? Perhaps. Some people look for things they can misinterpret to support their opinions and notions. They’re going to do that whether I hedge my retweets or not.

My point is that editors should trust journalists to know when a retweet needs some explanation and when it stands on its own. When editors disagree with how a staff member handles some retweets, they should discuss their concerns, encouraging strong Twitter engagement but noting why they didn’t like a particular decision. But I favor trusting judgment and having conversations about good judgment over guidelines that inhibit people’s use of Twitter.

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19 Responses

To play devil’s advocate, though … do we know how the Oregonian’s audience views retweets? It would be interesting to survey a slice of the general public, rather than journalists or people immersed in tech fields, and find out whether or not Twitter users in general tend to view a retweet as approval of the original message.

I don’t understand why many organizations are so afraid of RTs being looked at as endorsements. I’ve always looked at them as direct quotes — just as they’d be in any news story I’d write when quoting someone.

Especially nowadays when you RT someone, THEIR profile picture, THEIR tweet is repeated verbatim. The only way you are mentioned is that it shows up on your profile and in fine print under the tweet it says you retweeted it.

If clarification needs to be provided, do that before the RT or in a follow-up tweet. Not allowing reporters to RT for fear of it looking like endorsement is just ridiculous.

I see Erik’s point, especially as more people come to Twitter and perhaps don’t understand the ecosystem there. Retweeting does mean endorsement on many accounts. For others, it never means that. Some reporters even mention that retweets don’t constitute endorsement.

If I’m new to Twitter and I follow my local news reporters, it could be confusing. And to Sarah’s point, many people don’t just hit retweet. They RT @, so their own image appears.

A key problem with many these discussions is reductionism. (Let’s not pretend Twitter doesn’t create part of that problem.) But it’s a fairly complicated matter to publish content in the same stream — in tiny bites no less — that makes no distinction between a journalist, an activist and a casual consumer while ensuring your reader that all the usual standards are in place. Peter’s job is much trickier than Jeff’s — who lives by the standards he created for himself.

I agree! Retweets are not endorsements, but there’s a social responsibility to remain cognizant that some native retweets may necessitate accompanying context.

However, I might understand if a newspaper subscribes to a more restrictive policy because the organization may not have the resources (employee time) to ensure their journalists are accountable to a debatable gray-area guideline.

I hope people will put it in words instead. The folks who engage in these debates are likely techier than average; I think most people would find “Retweets are not endorsements” easier to recognize at a glance than the mathematical inequality symbol.

RTs aren’t necessarily endorsements, but they certainly can be and often are used in that way.

RTs ≠ quotes. In a story, quotes are surrounded by context. With an RT, context often exists outside the RT. Thus, interpreting the intent of an RT, aside from blatantly obvious exceptions (such as you RT’ing someone disagreeing with you), requires some familiarity with the person’s tweeting style/practices (e.g., Jay Rosen’s use of the naked RT to convey an eye roll).

I don’t think journalists can assume that familiarity, especially when they’re just one of hundreds/thousands of voices in someone’s Twitter stream. Andy Carvin overcomes that problem by being extremely prolific (thus increasing your exposure to his tweets and increasing likelihood of your being familiar with his tweeting practices) and being very consistent in the way he uses the RT. Most people on Twitter, even journalists who do effectively use the platform, don’t tweet that way and can’t assume that familiarity.

As for the Oregonian, is there a copy of the actual policy somewhere, or are we just going off of the two paragraphs from the AJR story? If it’s the latter, then it seems relatively benign, more akin to a caution that you should assume anything you put online will be public somewhere at some point in time.

Thanks for the comment, John. You’re right that RTs are not quotes, but they are closer to quotes than they are to endorsements. To be clear, I am not saying that journalists should not provide context to RTs. I think they often should. But I think editors should trust the journalists judgment, rather than prescribing how they should or shouldn’t retweet. As described in the AJR story and explained by Peter Bhatia, I disagree with the plans of the Oregonian. As reported by AJR and by Bhatia, these are pending guidelines and I offered my advice in advance of publication, because I think they are headed in the wrong direction.

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